by: The Cranky Foreigner

Will someone please explain this one to me? Especially considering our recent experience with a bunch if little school kids singing a song about three presidents, including Obama, and having Tucker Carlson compare that to the Khmer Rouge. Remember that the Khmer Rouge killed about one quarter of the population of their country? (OK. So if 75 million people show up dead tomorrow, Tucker, I’m sorry—you were right.)

But, as the Cranky Foreigner, I tend to digress. This year, as every year, there is a story that will be all over the TV and multiplex, and neither Rush nor Bill O’Reilly will comment on it once. It’s about a man who sets the standard for how business is done in America. He pays his employees as little as possible, their working conditions are barely acceptable, he couldn’t give a damn about health care for their children, and he scorns charity. He is what we proudly call a “Reagan Conservative.” Then he goes home and gets three almost Biblical spiritual visits and, lo and behold, the next day he wakes up and is a Ted-Kennedy liberal. He suddenly pays a living wage, improves working conditions, spends a chunk of cash on his employee’s family health-care and can be counted on for a generous charitable donation every Christmas.

Let me repeat this: He goes to bed a conservative and wakes up a liberal. And he lives happily ever after. It’s the most blatant liberal propaganda in America. And to my amazement, every year, very conservative corporations, like Disney, will tell it with such tenderness that tears will come to our eyes.

The story, you’ve guessed by now, is A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens—the Michael Moore of his day. So how does this one slip under the right-wing talk avalanche every year?

Maybe it’s the “long ago, Jesus thing.” Jesus tells us we should feed the poor—and not just scraps from the table. We should invite poor people to sit at the table even at wedding feasts. On Sunday morning, we love to hear that, but try actually doing it. Imagine this text message going to your spouse on your daughter‘s big day: “Honey, tell the caterers one more at the head table. I just invited a poor person who was begging outside Food Lion.” Everything would be so much easier if we just did it 2,000 years ago, or in Scrooge’s case, 150 years ago. But now?

Maybe people just don’t see beyond the surface. The Wizard of Oz was a parody of the gold standard economists in the twenties. Oz is the ounce of gold. The yellow brick road is gold bricks. The tin man, (the industrial worker), the scarecrow (the farmer) and the Cowardly Lion (William Jennings Bryan, the gold standard’s chief proponent) meet naive Dorothy and her Toto, who pulls back the curtain to reveal the charade of their economic theory. How many Americans realize that “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow” is an economics lecture?

But A Christmas Carol is much more obvious than that. Who can miss going to bed as a Reagan Conservative and waking up as a Kennedy Liberal? Yet, we seem to miss it every year? Maybe it’s the reptile brain thing. Anatomists tell us that our new, fancy cerebrum has grown over the old reptile brain, which still functions in parallel, doing the same things it did 150 million years ago. It handles the four Fs: fighting, feeding, fleeing and fu... let’s just call it sexual activity. Our new human brain writes sonnets and does Sudoko. I think that politics is basically reptile activity. (That would explain a lot, would it not?) And it makes sense that story-telling is cerebral. So our frontal lobe gets us all misty when we see how happy Scrooge is on Christmas morning, and our reptile brain thinks that Mrs. Bob Cratchet is pretty hot and we should have it on. And never shall our two brains meet.

Merry Christmas from the Cranky Foreigner.